Aprimotapiado formed as a result of Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes. The group aims to bring together the multi-layered meanings of the contemporary present with the traditions of the past, converging art and the social context and the object and our memories of it, to create sustained discourse about the symbiotic relationship between society-artist/history-art. Aprimotapiado explores these issues through the creation of artist's books and object texts, investigating how the disciplines of literature and visual art, when viewed through a historical lens, generate a comingling of memory and the present though art. Aprimotapiado’s projects engage directly with the community. Their workshops are produced with and for those communities who are responsible for generating the collective memories of a particular place. The group and their collaborative partners seek not only to revise and assimilate forgotten histories, but to reproduce, through books and objects, the simulacra of history.

The project in Cine y Video en Tijuana investigates and reflects on the strategies of representation of the city and the political use of these representations by local film makers. To achieve these aims, the group investigates the diverse local approaches to image production. Seeking to uncover overarching strategic approaches towards disseminating a message, they reflect on the content (subject matter) of works produced as well as critically analyze the structure of the image-making organization and the formal qualities of the work.

Cuerpo y diálogo seeks to generate a space to reflect on the body as it is performed in the city. The body has been exponentially transgressed by the growing conditions of violence in Tijuana, where exceptional corporal phenomena such as self-medication, suicides, and drug addiction are registered on the border on a daily basis. This research project was initiated by the dance and performance collective Lux Boreal, whose dancers serve as incarnated sensors tracking the experience of the body in the city. The body of the group (its members) will serve as a transmitter through the corporeal logging of movements translated into a map of double interaction: the city and the virtual. The aim of Cuerpo y diálogo is to encourage civic participation in this space of bio-power where bodies re-configure the use and perception of the city through the construction of new cartographies: thefts, kidnappings, murders, military presence, etc. How does the body react to this urban transformation? Adriana Trujillo serves as interlocutor for this project.

Emergency – Emergent Agency deals with discarded, leftover, marginal messages, and misrepresented groups, all of which are part of the circuit which mainstream media maintain captive and administrated. While mass media claims to present information in an objective manner, the context of information is stripped away by the brief form in which information is presented, leaving the private parties who own the media to control the way in which meaning is produced. The project, organized by Lui Velasquez, is being facilitated by a chain of social actors, including an art therapy facilitator, artists, a mass media producer, art students and the general public.

bulbo (Tijuana, Mexico, 2002) is an art collective that explores the possibilities of exchange and collaboration while using broadcast media with constructive aims. For PCDI, bulbo have produced Participación, a project conceived in partnership with the journalists Daniel Salinas and Omar Martínez, which explores the mobilization of citizen participation and activism to counter violence in Tijuana.

What is urban quality of life? Is it articulated in the same way in different parts of the city? Are we taking measures as a society to encourage greater quality of life? These are central questions raised by the project Urbanismo Ascendente. Attempting to identify what the term ‘quality of life’ means to the citizens of Tijuana, the project seeks to bring social actors in the city together to pool resources and create a platform for projects and interconnections. Urbanismo Ascendente is a project devised by the architecture collective Urbarea, the association Tijuana Calidad de Vida, and interlocutors urbanist Rene Peralta and sociologist Fiamma Montezemolo.

The interdisciplinary collective La Línea is a group of female artists who work with words. The group was founded in 2003 with the aim of promoting the creative work of young people in the arts. Since then La Línea has organized readings, book presentations, exhibitions and interventions in situ. El proyecto de las morras is not an experiment. It is the possibility of opening a dialogue with women who live in confinement in a drug rehabilitation center. We, morras employ our knowledge and our literary resources to construct a bridge with and for these women. In this process, we think it is possible to recognize ourselves when we listen to our own voices. Our voices include the voice of every member of La Línea and the voice of every woman of The Mezon. The challenge is to learn to listen to ourselves. La Línea accompanies these women on the journey to find their voice, a journey towards self-discovery, to a place where there is an end to being invisible i n s i d e / o u t. Without these women, our voices are incomplete.

The Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes (PCDI) project is a collective effort to bring artists, various collaborators, and the museum together in actively sharing and investigating the nature of their cultural practices and its relationship to the city.

PCDI also shares the interests of the exhibition after which it is named. Proyecto cívico, is an exhibition of international and regional artists organized for the inauguration of El Cubo, the Centro Cultural de Tijuana's (CECUT) new exhibition venue. The exhibition is an investigation into the state of political, civic, and social exceptions that govern daily life in Tijuana, but whose symptoms are increasingly observable in all contemporary nations. These exceptions have, as theorist Giorgio Agamben argues, brought the very concept of citizenship into question.

Working closely with the exhibition curators Lucía Sanromán and Ruth Estévez, the PCDI organizer Bill Kelley, Jr. has put together a working format in two phases where local groups, in and around Tijuana, have considered the exhibition's core themes and situated them in relation to their own cultural work. During the first phase, seven distinct groups, along with their collaborators and interlocutors, spent three months collectively researching their shared interests, using the exhibition’s curatorial framework as a starting point. Insights were continually published online through group blog sites that will be become the basis for discussion, negotiation, and publication with online journals situated in different cities throughout the Americas. During the second phase, the editorial interlocutors will work with groups in examining the conceptual framework of their project for publication. Public programming events and publications will be presented during the exhibition’s stay at El Cubo.

The Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes public programming project works in parallel with the exhibition and is an attempt to see art, the museum, and the city through a wide and dialogical lens. In an attempt to generate what theorist Jürgen Habermas calls a discursive democracy, The PCDI will create a framework for local artists and civic groups to participate in open and critical dialogue concerning their work and the city, and to collaboratively develop El Cubo’s public programming.

Given the slow and steady erosion of rights and social spaces the PCDI project will create a temporary structure around shared spaces and experiences. Artists are adept at finding ways to make things work despite obstacles, and have found in their exceptionality within the larger community a powerful instrument of reflection, dissection and sometimes transformation. The current role of art within the larger dialogue of politics and human relations makes a claim for considering myriad of ways artists engage their surroundings as physical and social spaces. The PCDI project is envisioned as an attempt to rethink museum public programming and engage the public in new and more meaningful ways.

Situating this forum for community dialogue as public programming is certainly appropriate. Issues surrounding the city and the rights of its citizens have never been more important, and the museum as a civic space, will dedicate space and resources for an open discussion. Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos e Interrogantes, organizer Bill Kelley, Jr. adds: “Dialogical and pedagogical cultural work—long a format for theory and practice—is slowly finding its way into the larger curatorial and institutional matrix of possibilities. This project presents an interesting opportunity for everyone involved: the museum, curators, interlocutors, and artists alike. The point is not to intervene, but to dialogue, taking on the idea of political exception and the possibilities created by a civic vacuum by asserting our interconnected willingness to participate in a democratic action.”

PCDI investigations will be formally presented to the public in late November and early December, further enriching and extending a cross-national dialogue between artists, activists, curators, publications, and the public at large within the civic space of the museum. Documentation and insights published online by research group members will culminate in an edited compilation available after the exhibition's completion at El Cubo.

The seven PCDI groups:

• The artist and audiovisual collective bulbo is paired with journalist Daniel Salinas and photojournalist Omar Martínez, and will be publishing their research with Buenos Aires based Ramona. The project entitled Participación will investigate the activist and social groups that resulted from the recent narcotrafficing wave of violence and kidnappings.

• The architecture collective Urbarea is working with Rene Peralta, urban theorist and the anthropologist Fiamma Montezemolo, and will be publishing with Triple Canopy, a journal based in New York. The project entitled Urbanismo Ascendente will attempt to map out areas of the city that are collaboratively being regenerated by local communities.

• The writing collective La Linea is working with the sociologist Norma Iglesias, the psychologist Elsa Jirón, and the artist/activist collective Frente 3 de Fevereiro and will be publishing with Mexico City based Replicante as well as Los Angeles and Buenos Aires based LatinArt.com. El proyecto de las morras is an effort to extend the creative act of writing within rehabilitation centers for women.

• Aprimotapiado is project by Jennifer Donovan and Gabriela Torres Olivares that investigates the historical construction of tradition and context through art and literature in the area of Rosarito. They are collaborating with poets Myriam Moscona and Jen Hofer and will be publishing with Buenos Aires based journal Magazine en Situ.

• Emergency – Emergent Agency is project by the Lui Velazquez art space and collective that brings together artist interlocutors Ricardo Dominguez and Michael Trigilio. The project works with at-risk youth in San Diego, and students at Universidad Autónoma Baja California (UABC) to investigate discarded, marginal messages and misrepresented groups in the media and will be publishing with the Los Angeles based Journal of Aesthetics and Protest.

• The Tijuana dance and performance collective Lux Boreal and writer Adriana Trujillo are creating a research project entitled Cuerpo y diálogo that will consider the relationship between the body and the city through performance. The group will be publishing with Experimentos Culturales, a journal based in Quito.

• The project entitled Cine y Video en Tijuana is made up of several filmmakers based in Tijuana. The group will be investigating the key issue of representation while working with filmmaker Jesse Lerner and critic Rafa Saavedra. They will be publishing with the Mexico City based journal Replicante.